We used ZIP drives in a post production facility doing computer animation and early non-linear editing. I think I had a SCSI ZIP drive on one of my Commodore Amigas at home and used them for a while They are essentially a hard drive in a cartridge, so of course the failure rate is going to be higher than a fixed, sealed disc. They very capably filled a brief niche before thumb drives and easily removable eSATA and USB connections etc become popular. Before that it was kind of a pain to move and re-mount a disk reliably from one PC to another.

I avoid going to the movies these days purely because of the insane amount of commercials shown beforehand. I paid money to get in. And you are showing me commercials on top of that. I don't do commercials. They are not something I want to waste my life watching. I am not your target market. If I can't pay for a commercial-free experience I'm not doing it.

There are precious few theaters out there that don't show commercials. And none near us. I am down to 1 - 2 visits to a theater per year for films I really want to see on a big screen. I didn't stop liking going to the movies, but they've driven me away and the at-home experience is now excellent.

Larger screens and better sound are good. But they're not addressing the elephant in the room. I'm happy to pay a few extra dollars for a commercial free experience.

does that mean they'll continue to manufacture the same old models for the US market, which will possibly become less secure over time due to advanced hacking techniques applied to the same old well known hardware? Will it then result in a net loss in security over time?

It might resemble Cuba with their 1950s automobiles, frozen in time. I do agree that there is concern about backdoors and surreptitious identifying data sent to servers under control of China. Would it be better to allow new models, but require them to be completely torn down and reverse engineered by teams inside the FCC, or for their firmware source code to be handed over for inspection? (there's still room for nefarious business....hand over one set of code and install a slightly different set, or install a backdoor with a firmware update....)

I feel there's a legitimate concern here, and there always has been. What's a better solution, if any? Or is this the right solution for digital sovereignty?

Since I'm still using windows 10, I can just lean back and chuckle. It's been a hell of a shit show to watch over the years. Glad I'm not in it.

...when they renamed the company to follow that weird bent. It was very easy very early on to see that none of this would ever be popular, people had a hard enough time getting interested in even wearing polarized glasses to view movies in 3D, that whole trend has crashed and burned. (I like stereo photography myself, but I understand the problem with mass appeal) But the fact that they expected people to run out and buy these super expensive VR headsets and do things with them is just laughable. I've watched that market try to take off since the 80s and there's just not a compelling use for it. I thought they were mad for going down that road yet again. Maybe that day will come, but it was super obvious from the start that Meta plowing billions of dollars into it and changing their company name wasn't going to make it happen. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the pitch about the metaverse inside Facebook. Techbros deluding themselves. I think they were just scrambling to place a bet on whatever the next hot thing would be after the initial round of social media companies and they lost horribly. In the mean time, their original product, despite being enshittified repeatedly, remains somewhat useful and popular. (just install SocialFixer and ad blockers before you touch it, don't use their app....)

Of course, I'm still happily using Outlook 2019 on a bought and paid for standalone office license. I see no reason to 'upgrade'.

Monster sure had a great run convincing everyone otherwise. It became something of a joke in the early 2000s. They definitely took from P.T. Barnum's playbook. A sucker born every minute.

Agree with another commenter, overall system noise becomes more critical at the amplification stage. Most cheap stereos in the 90s had a modicum of white noise in the silence when you turned it way up. But one day a roomate got an -amazing- setup and it was so clean, and had so much dynamic range, it blew my mind. Was just great to put on a well engineered CD and listen to it with your eyes closed. With CDs you had the best possible input for consumer grade audio, and if you fed it through something that kept it clean, it was just pristine and fantastic. I haven't heard anything like it in a long time. These days my Bose noise cancelling headsets deliver really excellent sound, but my hearing isn't what it used to be. Tinnitus and a little bit of high frequency hearing loss all around prevent me from appreciating that last 10% in quality, so for me to pursue a setup like that now would be kind of wasted money. But I'm glad I got to hear it when I could appreciate it.

I own a Mazda with the center console scrollwheel. It is completely awesome. No reaching whatsoever, and very easy to navigate. It should be a model for everyone else. It got high praises when first introduced. Nothing has changed. This sounds like they just want to lower the cost of the car by getting rid of the wheel, button and associated wiring. I'm planning on a replacing my current Mazda with a slightly used one anyhow, which will still have the scroll wheel. Unbelievable. So dissapointed at Mazda.

...that it can mimic a lenticular stereo display? If it can do eye tracking and adjust every other column of pixels to every other eye, it might be able to do that.

Yea I feel like they got super cheap in both build quality and processing. They used to make really nice DVD players (and VHS and S-VHS players for that matter.) At some point they became commodity items and no one wanted to pay a lot of money for them anymore. China ate their lunch.

The very first BRD players, while better build quality, also had awlwful start and load times. They never really got great, but there was a time when the 2nd and 3rd gen machines were OK.

I haven't touched my BRD recorder in years. I used to sell videos I made on BD-R and DVD-R, until I started monetizing my YouTube channel, which brings in far more viewers and income with zero work once the video is uploaded. I used to buy printable BRD discs, jewel cases, print an insert for the jewel case, mail the disc...it was a lot of work for not much return. Late 2000's.

YouTube has democratized the distribution of independent videos. Their revenue split for ads is still the best deal out there. I just don't know how there is enough drive space in the world to accommodate the amount of video that is uploaded every minute to that service. One source says every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YT. I just can't see where that all goes. Are they constantly shipping in truckloads of hard drives? Will the whole thing collapse under its own weight? They don't seem to delete anything except videos that run into policy violations or copyright claims.

Fun story: I was at NAB (The National Association of Broadcaster's conference) in Las Vegas when the winner of the two dueling HD disc formats was picked. It was down to BluRay Disc championed by Sony, and HD-DVD by Toshiba. The studios decided to throw their weight at the BluRay Consortium during that show, and instantly the HD-DVD booth become a rather sad ghost town. BluRay wasn't great for independent producers, there were clauses that stated that for commercial discs you HAD to include encryption, even if you didn't want to, making doing a production run at a disc facility very expensive. It was a licensing scheme designed to make money for the consortium. So I stuck to making BRDs myself as a work around, since my numbers were so small. BRD works for the major labels but it was a terrible format for us small time folk. It was easier to make VHS tapes, you just sent a master to a dupe facility and they cranked them out. Of course, VHS was complete garbage as a format, but it was what we had. Fun times, and now ancient history, thank god.

If you already have the physical book, why would you want to suddenly jump to an audio version of it? I can't see that market being huge. The only scenario I can think of is if you are reading the book, and you want to continue 'listening' to it when you can't read it (driving in a car, etc.) Most people I know (including myself) are kind of one way or another, they either like reading real books, or listening to audio books. I'm a real book person, but I do listen to a number of podcasts by authors of books (The rest is History, Empire, etc.) and the sale of books would at least be good for them as they could have direct-purchase buttons for books they've referenced in their shows, including their own.

Light passenger rail is ideal for batteries. With lightweight trains and low rolling resistance, coupled with regenerative braking, it should be pretty easy on the batteries. The only issue would be the batteries catching fire underground...might be better for surface transport.

I hope it reminds everyone that every interaction they have with non-local AI is logged and available to the next hacker in line. If you're typing anything into an online service of any kind (or into a document stored in the cloud) assume that it could be leaked and behave appropriately. Do you want the thing you are asking about to become public?

No one wanted to be intensely surveilled while shopping? Never would have thought. Sure, grocery stores today have tons of cameras (look up!) but typically they only use the footage when they need it as evidence to convict a shoplifter.